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All we have to do is lock up all the bad people who disagree with us... and then we win.

A Philosophy major is generally considered almost as useful as a fork with all the tines broken off. An assistant professor of philosophy has the same career track as a Blockbuster Video employee in 2020 but without any of the glamour.

But like cockroaches after a nuclear apocalypse, some like Lawrence Torcello, an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Rochester Institute of Technology, are adapting by putting their knowledge of Kant to turning out proper cant.

At The Conversation (not to be confused with just any conversation), a site that bills itself as a platform for academics to practice journalism, an idea up there with enrolling serial killers in dental school, Global Warming and the lack of belief in the faith of the green Chicken Little is a source of much concern.

Rod Lamberts, Deputy Director, Australian National Centre for Public Awareness of Science at Australian National University, says that in the debate, "Forget the Moncktonites, disregard the Boltists, and snub the Abbottsians. Ignore them, step around them, or walk over them. Drown them not just with sensible conversations, but with useful actions. Flood the airwaves and apply tactics advertisers have successfully used for years."

"What we need now is to become comfortable with the idea that the ends will justify the means."

And then invade Poland by the spring.

It really tells you something when the Deputy Director for an organization dedicated to the Public Awareness of Science sounds like he just stepped out of The Network.

But topping him is Torcello, an Assistant Professor of Philosophy with big, big ideas. Like locking up everyone who disagrees with him.

We have good reason to consider the funding of climate denial to be criminally and morally negligent. The charge of criminal and moral negligence ought to extend to all activities of the climate deniers who receive funding as part of a sustained campaign to undermine the public’s understanding of scientific consensus.

Those funding climate denial campaigns can reasonably predict the public’s diminished ability to respond to climate change as a result of their behaviour. Indeed, public uncertainty regarding climate science, and the resulting failure to respond to climate change, is the intentional aim of politically and financially motivated denialists.

My argument probably raises an understandable, if misguided, concern regarding free speech. We must make the critical distinction between the protected voicing of one’s unpopular beliefs, and the funding of a strategically organised campaign to undermine the public’s ability to develop and voice informed opinions. Protecting the latter as a form of free speech stretches the definition of free speech to a degree that undermines the very concept.

I always love misguided concerns about free speech. Who are those lunatics who don't understand that criminalizing arguing your point of view in the public space is fundamentally different than freedom of speech?

Especially when your point of view prevents people from forming informed opinions that are of the right sort.

Isn't it obvious? All we have to do is lock up all the bad people who disagree with us... and then we win.

It worked in the USSR. It's bound to work in the Philosophy Department of the Rochester Institute of Technology.

I don't seem to see a lot of articles by critics of Global Warming calling for the imprisonment of all Warmists for the protection of the public. Maybe it's because they're the good guys.